As a society and individually, we use energy every moment of our lives to improve our quality of life. Energy 101 will develop the big picture and connect the details of our energy use, technology, infrastructure, impact, and future.
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From the course by Georgia Institute of Technology
Energy 101: The Big Picture
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From the lesson
Energy, Society and Economy
This module introduces the concepts of impact of energy issues on society, sources of energy, role of fossil fuels and issues of oil import
Meet the Instructors
Dr. Sam SheltonProfessor Emeritus
Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering
Dr. Richard A. SimmonsSenior Research Engineer & Fellow
Strategic Energy Institute
Hello, welcome back to Energy 101. Today we're talking about energy sources
that we use to supply the energy that we want in our society.
That we talked about last time.
Society is the tail that wags the energy dog.
And, society would like things to make
life easier, and more comfortable and more productive.
And, but the laws of nature are such that, if we want energy, such as
lighting and heating and cooling, we have to find it somewhere in this natural form.
So today, we're going to start on looking at the source of the energy that
we use to supply society's wants and needs for
to making life better. And the first one that we'll talk
about. Well, the
the, as we talk, as we mentioned last time, the
energy in buildings, energy manufacturing, and energy in transportation.
So, today we're talking about energy sources, and where we get our energy from.
The, first we're going to talk about hydrocarbon supplies.
Fossil fuels.
And, if you, they're the primary supplier for our energy needs.
And 20% of our total energy supplies come from coal.
26% comes from oil.
And 36% comes from natural gas. Those are the three fossil fuels.
They are hydrocarbons. They got hydrogen and
carbon in them. And we'll see that in detail as we move
forward. But you see that the The
other supplies that we use, that are non fossil fuels, is nuclear.
That is in the form of nuclear power plants, and that supply is about
10% of our nuclear, of our total energy's
uses in, in society, and that's actually energy form is coming from uranium.
When we get to renewable we're, we have biomass
which is wood, corn ethanol, etc, things that we grow.
We have hydro en, hydro dams, that ele,
we generate a lot of electricity from, hydro plants.
We have wind energy. That's our recent renewable
energy form that's been rapidly developed.
And then we have geothermal energy in which we drill down in the earth and
in some cases we can bring up hot water or hot steam as a heat source.
That we can use to drive our energy systems.
And solar is about 0.2% you can see you hear a lot about solar.
But it's actually considerably,
makes a smaller contribution at this point
than wind, and that's been because of economics.
But economics of solar is looking better every year, and
that number is growing rapidly as we'll see later on.
Here's the overall primary trend, for
all these energy sources, that we're utilizing.
It's a very
busy slide. Let me just point out some details here.
Number one, it, it looks at the energy production.
And production rather than consumption, and I have a reason
for that I'm showing production is it'll become obvious later on.
But this is the US energy production by energy source
that we use in this country to drive our society.
And it shows that from 1950, and that was not, not long after World War Two,
and we were a relatively undeveloped nation from
a economic viewpoint, compared to what we are now.
And our energy needs have grown considerably.
Here's how it has grown from 1950 to, 2012.
You can see starting at the top, the blue is natural gas.
Natural gas was very low back here in 1950.
And now, it, we're getting more energy from natural
gas than any other, looking at the most recent data.
coal, is has been, always been, not always, but certainly in recent history.
Has been the primary energy supplier, for many years, and
it's leveled off and has dropped.
By the way, this drop in coal utilization,
coal production right here is tied to the recession.
Which, we've seen is the economic impact.
Of slower, the economy, means we use less energy.
Here's crude oil, and again this is the one that really becomes
apparent that our that I'm showing energy production in this case and not
energy use.
our, our oil production in this country actually peaked in about 1970, notice.
And it has declined generally over time since then.
And we now, down here where we, we brag a lot about how much our oil
production has increased which we see by this blip down here on the bottom right.
And on the right hand side.
Because it has come up with, fracking,
and, and other technologies that we have developed.
But, we are a long ways from producing as much oil as we did back in 1970 when oil
was about $2 a barrel in, in which is about $8 a barrel in today's dollars.
Nuclear has steadily risen
along with as we put in more and
more nuclear power plants, we made them more reliable.
And are able to run them more.
Biomass, which I categorized before.
You can see how it's grown, and then we, a
lump of other renewables in there as a, as a lump.
One that we haven't talked about, but we will
get to and is important to show, and that's NGPL.
That stands for natural gas liquids. Natural gas liquids.
Natural gas petroleum liquids in this case with a P is
sometimes it's just NGLs, natural gas liquids, or natural gas petroleum liquids.
Those are liquids that come out with natural
gas, and they're things like propane, butane, etc.
But we'll talk about those more later and it's important to seperate
those and start seeing that that's different than natural gas.
So, that's the overall trend of our energy use
that how, where we're getting that energy supply from.
And it's a busy slide, but it's a lot of information on there to
see how things have changed over time in our energy production in this country.
And by the way, the the only one that that we,
we don't, aren't, we aren't fairly independent on, and
we produce essentially all that we use is crude oil.
And that's the one that we'll look at later.
We import a lot of crude oil, because our consumption is steadily risen even though
our peak is down from 1970, our
production, our, our use has continually gone up.
We'll talk about that more later.
So, this, this is the pie chart showing where we get our energy from today.
And it's the same numbers I've shown you before but sometimes it's easier
to think about here, and see when we have it in a pie chart.
Oil at 36%.
Natural Gas at 26%. Coal at 20%.
Nuclear at 9.
Biomass at 5.
Hydro at 3, wind at a little over 1, and solar at about 0.2.
So, that's, where we're getting our energy from is
the big picture, and we'll look at each of those
energy, sources, throughout the, rest of the course and
first we'll be taking up coal and the fossil fuels.
Thank you.
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